14 DAY TRIAL // There’s no doubt that Windows 8’s Start Screen is the most controversial feature of the new operating system, but Microsoft has absolutely no intention to bring back the traditional Start button.
And users don’t really need it, Julie Larson-Green suggested in an interview with MIT Technology Review. She said the Start Screen is the perfect “dashboard” for users to quickly access the content they need the most on their computers.
“With Windows 8, all the different things that you might want to do are there at a glance with the Live Tiles. Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care about all at once. It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done,” she explained.
Company CEO Steve Ballmer said in October that users don’t need the traditional Windows feature because “they have a whole screen as a Start button.”
In addition, Steven Sinofsky, the former Windows boss, said during the official Windows 8 launch event that the Start Screen is facing the same fate as the Start button: it was heavily criticized at first, but it’s now one of the features you can’t live without.
So it’s all just a matter of time until everybody gets used to it, Sinofsky explained.
“You know, as familiar and productive as Windows 7 is for customers today, the world that led to Windows 7 began back in the early 1990s when familiar concepts like the Start menu were first conceived. Familiar today, but completely new when it was first released. That technology world was so very different than the world we experience each and every day,” he added.
Sinofsky is also believed to be the one who insisted for a Start Screen, sources familiar with the matter have hinted soon after his departure from Microsoft.